Bon Voyage
The Telegraph Book of River and Sea Journeys

Stanley (a Telegraph correspondent in the nineteenth century) and then Tim Butcher a hundred and thirty years later. There is the first transatlantic voyage of the new Queen Mary, and one of the last cruises of the QE2. There are glimpses into the cabins of lone seafarers from Joshua Slocum to Ellen MacArthur. Sometimes the encounter - indeed, entanglement - with water leads to comedy, or even black farce, as when Tim Moore took his daughter rafting in Sweden, without realising that he would first have to build the raft. At other times, as with Jasper Rees's account of the lonely, tragic demise of the round-the-world-yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, the ocean is a place of pitiless indifference. But whether the voyage is out to the tiny island of St Kilda beyond the Outer Hebrides, or by icebreaker to the dazzling white ice sheet of Antarctica, or with the Bishop of Oxford on a coastal tour of India, Bon Voyage is an indispensable companion for your cabin, or even for a deckchair up on the sun deck.